Carleton Watkins' mammoth role in Yosemite Valley Grant Act

Photographer's epic images led to Yosemite Valley Grant Act

Kenneth Baker

Updated 6:01 pm, Friday, April 25, 2014

"Arch at the West End, Farallones" (1868 1869) Albumen print by Carleton Watkins,from the album Photographs of the Pacific Coast. Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Photo: Carleton Watkins, Lent By Department Of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

"Arch at the West End, Farallones" (1868 1869) Albumen print by...

"Magenta Flume, Nevada Co. Cal." (c. 1871) Albumen print by Carleton Watkins from the album Photographs of the Pacific Coast. Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Photo: Carleton Watkins, Lent By Department Of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

"Magenta Flume, Nevada Co. Cal." (c. 1871) Albumen print by...

"Multnomah Falls, Cascades, Columbia River" (1867) Albumen print by Carleton Watkins, from the album Photographs of the the Columbia River and Oregon Lent by Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Photo: Carleton Watkins, Lent By Department Of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries

Fifteen years have passed since Northern California's last in-depth look at how Carleton Watkins saw it through his camera in the late 19th century.

"Carleton Watkins: The Stanford Albums," which opened this week at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center, presents scores of the vintage "mammoth plate" landscape views that first made Watkins' name in a highly competitive cohort of studio photographers in post-Gold Rush San Francisco.

The Cantor survey movingly underlines the coincidence between a new medium of witness - photography entered the world just a decade before Watkins did - and revelations of little-known terrain that America would soon claim as fundamental to its national identity. The show can leave visitors shivering with a revivified sense of their own historical position.

That SFMOMA show "Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception," marked 170 years since Watkins' birth in 1829.That exhibition put more emphasis than the Cantor one does on the intrusions of industries - mining, lumber, railroads - into terrain nearly immune to human influence for millennia before.

Yet visitors will feel tremors of ecological foreboding from Watkins' work more sharply in the Cantor show.

There are quite a few images from SFMOMAs show that appear in the present exhibition, which celebrates the federal Yosemite Valley Grant Act, spearhead of a national parks initiative that Watkins' landscapes helped to propel.

But the SFMOMA show took a wide view of Watkins' work. It put more emphasis on San Francisco views and included images made in Arizona and Utah.

The Cantor focuses on images of Northern California and the Columbia River and environs in Oregon, drawing on three albums of mammoth plate prints that reside in the Stanford libraries.

The more we hear about the acceleration of future drift toward an unlivable planet, the more we think about when and how that process began. And the more weight we accord to an image such as "Oswego Iron Works/Willamette River" (1867) or "Magenta Flume/ Nevada Co. Cal." (c. 1871), in which the conversion of tall fir trees into a lofty trestle appears to our eyes - as perhaps it did to Watkins' - ominously direct.

Otherworldly

The almost otherworldly social void of Watkins' most dramatic Yosemite photographs sets off the pictures in which incursions of industry or merely of civilization, as we used to call it, appear.

The landscapes' untrammeled emptiness and their perilous-looking vantage points also heighten the drama of Watkins' ambition and commitment.

The large custom-built camera he used and the other equipment needed to produce his stunning wet-plate collodion prints on site necessitated entering mountainous wilderness alone at the head of a loaded mule train.

A few pictures, such as "Multnomah Falls/Cascades, Columbia River" (1867), seem to describe impenetrable forest, hinting that little-explored terrain must have held its own thrill for Watkins, beyond spectacular photographic opportunity.

Despite all the physical risks he endured to make what have become canonical pictures, misfortune always seemed to find Watkins close to home.

From his hometown in upstate New York he arrived in San Francisco to find it ablaze with the great fire of 1851. His hopes of striking gold gave way to the practice of photography.

He found patrons to underwrite many of his working trips, but he repeatedly overestimated his business prospects.

A bank collapse that rocked the state in the mid-1870s caused a creditor to seize the assets of his San Francisco studio and gallery.

Watkins set out to rebuild his life and career, but marriage and fatherhood compounded his adversities in the 1880s. The indigent family of four ended up living in a railroad car until Watkins' old friend and railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington deeded to the family a ranch in Yolo County.

In 1906, the curator of Stanford's museum visited Watkins in San Francisco and agreed to catalog all of his work, preliminary to acquiring it for the university. Three days later, the great earthquake and fire destroyed Watkins' studio and its contents, leaving him destitute again.

Physical and mental deterioration led to Watkins, then in the care of his daughter, being declared mentally incompetent and committed to Napa State Hospital for the Insane. He died there in 1916.

The Cantor gives Watkins' work a dignified, well-paced presentation, the matted prints framed in black and hung on cocoa-colored walls that put a bass note to the pictures' sepia tones.

Stanford University Press has produced a large, lavish book documenting the Watkins albums. It contains extraordinarily faithful full-page reproductions of the works exhibited and more compact compilations in proper order of the entire albums' contents, permitting us to see aspects of Watkins' decision-making beyond individual pictures' margins.

The book also contains 17 short - for a museum catalog, prodigiously short - essays by commentators from several fields germane to Watkins' work.